


His Girl

by beargirl1393



Series: Hayffie Week [5]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Child Death, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 16:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4673819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beargirl1393/pseuds/beargirl1393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Effie is rescued from the Capitol cells, Haymitch learns that she isn't the only one he should be looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Girl

Haymitch was sitting beside Effie’s hospital bed when she finally woke up. After months of torture, that could have been prevented if Plutarch hadn’t dropped the ball, he didn’t know what to expect from her.

Maybe tears, quite possibly anger. ‘Why didn’t you save me?’ or ‘I hate you!’. Condemnation, refusal to speak to him…all were possibilities, in his opinion, and all were equally likely to happen.

What he didn’t expect was for Effie to ask if the war was over and if he knew where her sister was.

He told her that the war was over, yes, and that he had no clue where her sister was, why would he? He couldn’t remember ever meeting the woman, nor did he have an interest in her. He had been more concerned with keeping Effie safe from Coin and trying to keep Katniss from entirely collapsing. He didn’t have time to track down other Capitols.

“Where are the children, are they alright?” Effie asked worriedly.

Haymitch sighed. “The boy needs medical attention, they messed with his mind-“

“I know,” Effie interrupted. “They tortured Peeta and Johanna, in front of me, to try to induce compliance.” Other times they had done the opposite, they would torture Effie to try to get Peeta and Johanna to play along and film their propos, but she didn’t want to think about that now. “And Katniss? How is she?”

“Another hard question, sweetheart,” Haymitch muttered. “She’s in a room somewhere, a few doors down from yours actually, knocked out and grateful for it.”

“Why would Katniss be grateful for unconsciousness?” Effie asked, confusion and worry plain on her too thin face.

“She was badly burned during the attack that ended the war,” Haymitch said heavily. “And Prim was killed.” While he knows that the doctors would be able to heal Katniss physically without so much as a scar remaining, he had his doubts about whether or not Katniss would be able to recover mentally. When something similar had happened to him, he had tried for years to drown himself in a bottle. He didn’t know what Katniss would do to cope, or attempt to cope, and he was worried. Prim was everything to Katniss, and now that she was gone…

The confusion vanished from Effie’s expression, leaving the worry and making room for sorrow to appear. “How…?”

Haymitch sighed. “There was a plan, one I wasn’t informed of until too late. Gale suggested it and Coin loved it. Snow made himself a barricade of kids around his mansion, Capitol citizens grouped outside the barricade of children. Bombs were dropped, and then the healers were sent in. Bombs were dropped again, killing Prim and the other healers and badly burning Katniss. The hovercraft that dropped the bombs had a Capitol insignia, to convince the Capitols that Snow was behind the killings.”

He’d expected more sorrow, and likely pity for Katniss, but Haymitch hadn’t expected to see soul-deep terror and horror.

“Was Lavenne  there?” Effie demanded, once she seemed to come back to herself. “Do you have a list of the children who were…killed by the bombs? I need to know of any Capitol child’s death since the end of the Quell, regardless of what the reported cause of death was.” She needed to know what children had died since she had been imprisoned, basically.

“What?” he asked, nonplussed. He could understand Effie asking about her sister, even if he wasn’t sure that the two were that close, but this seemed to be something else entirely. “Sweetheart-“

“I have to know, Haymitch,” Effie said, and she seemed to be on the verge of pleading with him to get the information.

“Why is this so important to you? Your sister’s a big girl-“

“It’s not about Lavenne,” Effie interrupted. “It is about our daughter.”

Silence hung thickly in the hospital room for several minutes after that, Haymitch staring at Effie and Effie looking down at her blanket covered lap.

“What?” he barked, once he recovered. “We don’t have…”

“Five years ago,” Effie countered quietly, no looking up. “Although it may be closer to six now, as I lost all track of time while in the cell. Before you went back to Twelve after the games that year, we neglected contraception. My prescription needed to be filled and I thought nothing of it as I had been told that the possibility of ever being able to conceive a child was very slim.”

Haymitch had never wanted a drink so badly as he did now. He wanted Effie to stop, he didn’t want to know more, but it seemed like she couldn’t stop now that she had started talking.

“She was born two weeks before you returned to the Capitol. No one knew who the father was, of course, as I didn’t want to risk her being taken to Twelve and reaped as soon as she was old enough. Lavenne agreed to watch her for the few weeks each year that I needed to go to Twelve and then stay at the Training Center each year, as I couldn’t bring her along.”

Haymitch would have known, for one thing, and she wouldn’t have been able to properly take care of her daughter and do her duties as escort. Lavenne had children of her own, and she was good with children, so Effie had trusted her to keep an eye on her daughter when she couldn’t. “She was with Lavenne when I was captured, I thought that she would be safe…” No one had asked her anything about her daughter while she was in the cell, and she thought that, if they had suspected that she was Haymitch’s daughter as well, that question would have appeared at least once. When it didn’t, she had thought that her daughter was safe. Now…now she knew that their daughter was likely one of the countless civilian casualties in the war.

It was just his luck, Haymitch thought numbly, that he would find out that he had a daughter only after she was presumed dead.


End file.
